The Ups and Downs of MySQL AB

Wannabe Code Monkey writes "Forbes has an article about a recent MySQL deal with SCO and the reaction from the open source community: "It's been a rough week for Marten Mickos, the chief executive of open source database maker MySQL AB. First his most dreaded rival, Oracle acquired a company that supplies a key piece of MySQL's software, a move that could make life difficult for Uppsala, Sweden-based MySQL, which has the most popular open source database. If that wasn't bad enough, Mickos is being denounced as a traitor by noisy fanatics in the open source software community because last month he dared to make a deal with SCO Group, a company reviled by fans of Linux and other open source software.""

Comments

Groklaw Interviews MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos

[anandpur]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200510112 11450706

* no money went to SCO from MySQL, so MySQL is not supporting SCO financially
* it was SCO seeking out the partnership, not the other way around
* MySQL had stopped supporting SCO in 2004
* MySQL did not put out the press release about the partnership. Mickos did provide a quotation for the press release however. Here's the press release in question, taken from MySQL's web site. http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_ 948.html

Re:INDEMNITY? Will SCO sue us some day?

[jadavis]

PostgreSQL. A short list of benefits:
- MVCC reduces need for locking, often called "better than row-level locking"
- Also has row level locking
- ACID compliant
- transactions, and savepoints (which are SQL nested transactions)
- point in time recovery (PITR) allows "time-travel" and parallel timelines. It's a little much to explain here, but if you encounter a problem and notice it a week later, you can go back in time, prevent the problem, and replay everything else that happened that week. All the good and none of the bad from a sci-fi book :)
- VERY extensible: you can make user-defined functions in any of PL/pgSQL, PL/perl, PL/python, PL/java, C, or SQL. And if that's not enough, you can write another procedural language to support your favorite language.
- You can make a user-defined aggregate function using any of those languages.
- User-defined types
- triggers
- views
- subselects
- query rewriting rules (which can be used to make any view updatable/insertable)
- constraints
- good, well-maintained, and BSD licensed replication software available.

New in 8.1 (which is beta now):
- Two-phase commit (2PC)
- IN/OUT/INOUT parameters to functions
- rudimentary table partitioning
- bitmap index scans
- autovacuum intelligently automates a long standing maintenence procedure, making the database easier to administer.
- SQL ROLES
- more options for row-level locking